The party of the German radical right alternative for Germany (AFD) is an “extremist organization” and which has positions “incompatible with democracy”. It is the opinion of German intelligence, who has now officially classified the party led by Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, a party that was previously only “suspected” to represent a danger to the country.
The decision now allows the security services of the Federal Office for the protection of the Constitution (BFV), to strengthen surveillance on what is now the main opposition force of the country. The formation, for its part, however, denounced the move as “a blow to democracy”.
Accusations of racism and Islamophobia
According to a 1,100 pages ratio drawn up by experts, the AFD is a racist and anti-musulman organization. “At the center of our evaluation there is the concept of people defined on an ethnic and ancestral basis that characterizes the Afd, a concept that” devalues entire segments of the German population and violates their human dignity “, said the agency, according to which it is a position that” is not compatible with the democratic order “of the country.
“This concept is reflected in the overall anti-migrant and anti-musulman position of the party”, added the BFV, accusing the political movement of having fueled “irrational fears and hostility” towards individuals and groups.
New powers for secret services
The BFV needed this new classification to increase its surveillance, since its skills are more limited than other European secret services, due to the historical inheritance of Nazi and Communist Germany. The agency was able to proceed with the narrow after the AFD lost a legal cause last year against its previous label of “suspect organization”.
The new designation could compromise the public funding of the party and, according to the Ministry of the Interior, public officials affiliated to an extremist organization could be removed from their positions, depending on the role held.
The Afd insork
The AFD, which in the past has also received the support of the patron of Tesla Elon Musk, denounced the decision by calling it a political attempt to discredit and criminalize the party. “We will continue to act through legal ways against these defamatory attacks that endanger democracy,” said co-harders Weidel and Chrupalla in a note.
The classification comes a few days before the oath of the new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU popular, and in the middle of a heated debate inside his party on how to treat the Afd in the next parliament.
Growing party
In the national elections of February, the AFD has achieved historical success, exceeding 20 percent and arriving second behind the conservatives, a result that theoretically should lead it to preside over some key parliamentary commissions.
During the election campaign Merz had been accused of having broken the “health cordon” around the far right, when the conservatives had voted for the AFD a text to stiffen migration policy. The initiative had unleashed a wave of protests across the country. Merz, since then, has rejected any alliance hypothesis with the AFD, but the episode remains an open wound in the German political landscape.
In Germany Merz’s CDU voted with the far right of Afd (and Orban exults)
The debate in the CDU
An ally of Merz in the CDU-Csu, Jens Spahn, however, proposed to treat the AFD as a “normal” opposition party, to prevent her from adopting a victim narrative. However, many of the conservatives and in the rest of the parliamentary arch repel this line and could use the BFV decision to justify the exclusion of the party from key roles.
Markus Soeder, president of the Bavaria and leader of the CSU (the brother of the CDU of Merz), said that he considered the choice of the intelligence “The final alarm”, believing that alternatives for Germany is “an overall far -right party” that for these reasons it is necessary to “keep the health cord” because “there is no room for the enemies of democracy” in public institutions.
Banning
The interior minister Nancy Faeser specified that the BFV “operates autonomously” and that the decision is the result of “exhaustive and neutral exam, documented in a relationship of 1,100 pages”. Now Parliament could try to suspend public funding for the FD, but concrete tests would be needed that the party wants to undermine or overturn the German democratic order.
However, Faeser explained that “there is no automatism after such a classification”. While not excluding the possibility of banning the party, the minister recalled that a interdiction procedure presents “very high constitutional obstacles” and requires a motivated appeal to the Constitutional Court by the Bundestag, Bundesrat or Federal Government.
The outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz also invited caution. “I am against the head: we have to carefully evaluate this classification,” he said during a convention of the Protestant Church in Hanover.
The origins of the party
Founded in 2013 to protest against Eurozone saves, the AFD has turned into an anti-migrant party after Germany’s decision to welcome a large flow of refugees, especially Syrians, in 2015. Today is the most right-wing formation of the most successful in the country since the end of the Second World War. At the European Parliament he sits in the counters of Europe of sovereign nations, being considered too extremist also by the patriots of Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini.
